into account his 'Joseph complex'. In later years Napoleon indulged his
elder brother shamelessly, leading one to conclude that the childhood
hatred must have been compensated and the original aggression visited
on others. It was this consideration that led Freud to write: 'To push
Joseph aside, to take his place, to become Joseph himself, must have been
the little Napoleon's strongest emotion .... Hundreds of thousands of
strangers had to pay the penalty of this little fiend's having spared his
first enemy.' The early feelings of hostility towards his brother may well
have been compounded, in Napoleon's unconscious, by the idea that he
was a 'replacement child' for the first Napoleon, who died in 1765;
Joseph, therefore, had a clear identity and a clear focus in his parents'
affections which he, as a 'substitute', did not have.
Towards his father Napoleon always evinced an ambivalence character
ized by contempt for the real man coupled with idolization of Carlo or a
Platonic form of Carlo; this maybe found expression ultimately in
Napoleon's desire to be a second great French Emperor, the first being
Charlemagne who, bearing the same Christian name as his father, was the
ideal-type. Consciously, Napoleon disliked his father's extravagance and
addiction to pleasure, but was proud of him as a patriot and Paolista. Yet
it is universally conceded that during Napoleon's early life Carlo was a
shadowy figure. The really important early parental influence came from
his mother.
Some of the mistakes attributed to Letizia probably did not have the
consequences ascribed to them. Wilhelm Reich speculated, from the
mixture of great energy and passive tendencies, that Napoleon might
have been a 'phallic-narcissistic' character, as a result of an 'overfemini
zed' early socialization, with the nuns at school and the overbearing
Letizia at home. It is, however, unlikely that his brief attendance at the
nuns' school had any significant role in his formation, and it is surely far
fetched to imagine Letizia's beatings as the genesis of sado-masochistic
tendencies. However, the general thesis of an unconscious desire for
revenge against the opposite sex seems well grounded in the evidence of
his later life. In particular, he always thought of women as being totally
without honour, duplicitous, deceivers, liars.
In later life Napoleon always showered lavish praise on his mother in
public or when talking to inferiors. To intimates and confidantes it was a
different story, for then he allowed himself to express his darker feelings
about Letizia. In theory her meanness with money should have balanced
Carlo's extravagance but the adult Napoleon felt, though he would
obviously not have used the term, that both his parents were neurotic in
countervailing and fissiparous ways. He hated the way his mother got him
marcin
(Marcin)
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